Monk's Hermitage in a Cave

Around 1600 the Antwerp painter Joos de Momper made a speciality of wild, mountainous country, the kind most Flemish viewers had never seen, imagined from the studio and from other men's prints. This is one of his hermit landscapes. Tucked into a black cave, so small you have to hunt for him, a monk kneels by a little fire in the middle of towering rock. The theme was popular in his day, a reminder of retreat from the world, and painters like Bruegel had worked it before him. For a long time this panel was credited to another artist, Paul Bril, before scholars gave it back to Momper. It travelled well. By 1671 it belonged to Louis the Fourteenth, bought for the French royal collection from the banker Eberhard Jabach, which is how it came to hang, eventually, in the Louvre.